


Thereafter

by ecrivant



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Character Study, F/M, M/M, Other, Quiet, Reader-Insert, Slice of Life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-13
Updated: 2021-01-13
Packaged: 2021-03-17 15:42:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28727544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ecrivant/pseuds/ecrivant
Summary: After the climax of a one-night stand, Jean wanders around your apartment in reflection.  A short story about the graceless aftermath of sex with strangers.
Relationships: Jean Kirstein/Reader, Jean Kirstein/You
Comments: 11
Kudos: 67





	Thereafter

You had surrendered to sleep long ago, though he assumed you had not meant to. He had laid beside you as you did, and when your breathing slowed and your denuded body—having from fatigue gone slack—leaned heavy against him, he had silently and carefully pulled himself from underneath you and risen from the couch and grimaced at the way the sweat on his back had seeped onto its fabric and covered your still and peaceful form with a blanket. Flushing at the sight of your bare chest despite the wanton coalescence which had come before. 

The appeal of one-night stands was on him lost, yet there had been something about you in the lurid and flashing lights of that club he despised—looking slightly lost though not awkwardly so—that was so beguiling, and any reluctance about the whole affair, assuaged, as you had pushed him into your apartment and lasciviously pressed your lips to his and grabbed at his cock through fabric with hungry and desperate hands.

Though, mind now unclouded by lust, he reflected on the voyeuristic nature of it all. There was something about sex that felt like an ultimate, and to pass over all rapport and instead immediately indulge in physical desire—it was at once so intimate and detached. As if his mind observed as a third party as his body satiated its carnal wants. Perhaps on another night—one more inebriated and less ruminative—the appeal would be elucidated.

Not to mention the unspoken etiquette of fucking strangers—was he meant to leave, now? He moved to wake you but halted, overcome by a reticence foreign to him. Instead he twined his hands and watched as your face—remarkably unfamiliar to him—contorted for a moment at some somnial commotion. In mindless action his fingers scratched at a scab on his neck. He picked up boxer shorts unceremoniously thrown to the floor and pulled them up to his hips, now somewhat robed and feeling less carnal and beastly. The lino wood under sole—poorly installed, as it sank ever so slightly beneath his weight—felt cold and artificial, and it reminded him of perpetually-lit hotel lobbies and the foyers of office buildings and his first-year university dorm. He blinked twice, overwhelmed by the recollective spate by such imagery invoked. 

He found the bathroom behind the second door he tried. With door closed and impeding the hallway’s pervasive tungsten illumination, he pissed in near dark, save for the luminance offered by a weak nightlight which jutted from an outlet beside the begrimed mirror cabinet. He eyed his reflection as he washed his hands without soap, and the visage which stared back seemed as unfamiliar as the one dormant outside of this washroom—it looked ghostly and strange, dimly lit by that small lamp which casted shadows on uncomplimentary regions of his likeness, and its eyes were sunken and weary, and the pupils overblown, and the planes of this visage were waxen and greased by sweat, and it looked like the face of some troglodyte who seldom parted from his dwellings but on this night decided to venture into mortal domain. Upon this inspection made self-conscious. He ran water over his face and shivered as it splashed onto his unclothed chest and then enveloped his expression in a towel that at once smelled just and nothing like you. 

Eyesight made regular to the low light of the bathroom, he squinted as he opened the door and was met with hallway’s brightness. He had, before exiting, resolved to dress and leave, but was given pause by the room with door cracked which sat at the end of the hallway. It would be such an arrant invasion of privacy to enter what he assumed to be your room, but on the assumption he was never to see you again, nor was he going to rouse you to inquire about your life’s story, which was no doubt as interesting and uneventful as the next person’s, he saw this as the next best course of action if he was to know anything about you. A weak justification, he figured, for what was simply insatiable curiosity against which his conscience stood no chance. 

The room was quaint and somewhat plain, as if modeled after the description of a personal space—a room that, perhaps under different circumstances, he would have come to know. 

It smelled of cedar and fire smoke, a blend that effectively removed the space from the city in which it resided. 

A bookshelf which collected dust, and on it books with spines cracked, some so badly the titles themselves, unreadable. Reduced to nameless amalgams of words. 

A box, tattered cardboard, labeled and relabeled with tape and marker and laden with an ill-sorted clutter—the type of mess which had but to one no meaning. A box which in it contained several used calendars, a painting on a piece of driftwood, an empty glass jar. And beneath this manmade detritus laid a gaudy romance novel, a high school chemistry textbook never returned, a keychain with dozens of keys, an old deck of cards, a canteen engraved with unfamiliar initials, a sketchbook of mostly blank pages, a green vase, a small jewelry box of sea glass. And one layer deeper: a CD in two pieces, a bag of pills, trinkets from a dentist’s office, tearful, tired eyes, terrible and leaden thoughts, the remnants of a failed relationship. 

The kind of things that easily filled an apartment, if not curtailed. 

He raised his hands in surrender and stood and backed away from your things. A line, crossed long ago; and only now did the guilt come. It was time for him to leave. 

You did not rouse as he collected his clothing from the floor. 

Perhaps against his better judgment, he scribbled his name and phone number onto a piece of paper and with a magnet tacked it to your refrigerator. He stepped back and stared at his note—written on paper garish neon yellow—and thought for a moment before adding the addendum, beneath his name: _from the bar_. He did not want to give himself the credit of making such an impression on you as to not require some kind of clarification accompanying his name, which even to him, under the white lights of your kitchen, seemed alien. 

He returned to your sleeping form and pressed a kiss to your forehead—again, a strange act of impulse. Carried out as if he were a spouse departing. 

He turned off the lights as he exited and remarked the domestic scene before him—one so private and rarely seen—and at last closed the door and ventured into the night, which coming from the space interior was cold and uninviting. 

Somehow, though without assurance of its arrival, he already found himself waiting for your call. 

**Author's Note:**

> me, wondering how long i can use slice-of-life as a crutch to describe my plotless drivel: hey! thank you for reading! here’s a casual, slice-of-life, non-intrusive jean piece.
> 
> i really do appreciate the support of late. feedback is always appreciated, of course! more things coming soon! xoxo


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